sclpls

Very nice opening match! Love that kind of high pressure play style.

I love watching Clown 9... love watching them lose!

Also not allowing yourself the opportunity to root against a team with Envy on it is denying yourself one of the great pleasures of watching pro DOTA.

Yeah, as impressive as the Chinese teams have been Liquid have this aura about them right now where they seem light years ahead of the rest of the competition. Other teams might be able to take a game off them, but I really doubt anyone will figure them out enough to actually knock them out.

Yeah a 3 vs 3 online multiplayer team game would be the dream. Obviously I understand that would require a lot more balancing and resources that are outside the scope of even a successful indie studio, but still...

I'm playing it. It is the first Supergiant game that I unequivocally like. I enjoy sports games that don't exactly parse to any real world sports games, and I think the visual novel meta-layer that it is wrapped up in is a natural fit. But uhh... I can't find too many other people that think that. So far I've heard a lot of complaints from people that enjoy the sports game that find the visual novel stuff tedious (it is a lot of reading involved in this game), and people that enjoy the story seem to hate the actual mechanics of the sports game. So that's a bummer, but this is the first game they've made where I totally enjoy all the interactions involved in the game, and the production values are out of this world like all their games.

Bloodborne and Nick's playstyle didn't mesh. Also chat led him astray.

I'm going to be very disappointed if the Wizard Jam community doesn't take advantage of this gift of a title.

I've seen a handful of Bunuel films (his name always makes me laugh because I can't help but think of bunuelo, basically a donut ball). The ones that stood out to me were the Diary of a Chambermaid, and That Obscure Object of Desire.

A good friend of mine wrote a piece for the New York Times about the appeal of true crime podcasts for them. It's not a podcast genre I'm familiar with but I thought it was an interesting read. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/opinion/i-survived-domestic-violence-now-i-love-true-crime-podcasts.html

I hadn't thought of it in the context of platformers. I'm not super well versed in platformers because the hardcore ones are beyond me. I can finish the Metroid games, or like Limbo, but games like Oni and Guacamelee both eventually hit a difficulty spike that I lost patience at attempting to surpass. I don't think the reward structures of those games is really what I would take issue with for the most part so much as certain strains of them eventually demand a sort of mechanical precision I'm not necessarily interested in engaging with. That being said, I agree that the gradual introduction of permadeath and Dark Souls style penalties into platformers doesn't feel good to me. For example, Rogue Legacy was a game that really didn't impress me. I didn't enjoy it on a mechanical level, which is the most important aspect of a platformer, and I didn't appreciate the unlock system to me which felt more like a grind to me than the sort of thing that I would experience in a roguelike (a genre I mostly enjoy). When I first heard about Dead Cells I initially ignored it because of the Rogue Legacy comparisons. When I finally played it I found I actually did like it a lot more just because the controls felt a lot better to me. Unfortunately the grinding for unlocks system still rubs me the wrong way so it isn't clear to me that I'll get much more enjoyment out of the game since I've hit a point where it seems like to make any progress I'm going to have to repeat a lot of content that feels rote to me at this point. How far I go also seems dependent on a lot of RNG too, which is not great. I've also been playing a lot of Hollow Knight recently, which I think is excellent, and probably my favorite modern platformer. Unfortunately it also does the Dark Souls thing of you have to return to the spot you die to retrieve your money. This seems baffling to me for a ton of reasons: 1. The economy of the game works very differently to Souls. In HK you aren't spending your money to level up or buy lots of little items. There's basically a fairly fixed amount of stuff to buy in the world, and after you buy all of those things money in the game is worthless. 2. It typically isn't challenging to get back to where you died since super tough enemies and platforming sections are rare. 3. In the rare situations where it is difficult and you get stuck somewhere where you are at risk of dying again it is easy enough to cheese the system by exiting and re-entering the game where you will respawn at a safer location. So basically despite borrowing this mechanic from Dark Souls, it operates in a very different game environment, and so it doesn't feel good the way it does in Dark Souls. In Dark Souls I feel a sense of risk, tension, and excitement about trying to recover lost souls. In Hollow Knight it just feels like a tax on my time as a player.

Yeah exactly. It is a greater sin of strategy games to have a "dead man standing" design where you've definitely lost, but you still have to play out a bunch of turns. Better to get it over with.

For a competitive multiplayer game, I'm completely in favor of snowballing mechanics provided they are in the service of closing the game out faster.

One potential way to mixup the meta campaign for the XCOM games is a mod where XCOM has a notoriety/reputation level, and as that goes up the level of the recruits you can bring in improves. That would change the dynamic where a squad wipe = the campaign is over, and you could design tactical encounters with a greater expectation of squad massacres. That isn't something that is strictly necessary for XCOM 2 though, because I find the meta-campaign's doomsday clock is so easy to mitigate that rebuilding a new squad of super soldiers isn't that difficult to do. The problem is just that doing that causes the campaign to stretch out and become a bit tedious, especially if you take awhile to pick up the XP bonus perk. Anyway, as much as I don't agree with most of the panel's assessments of what the problems with XCOM and XCOM 2 in particular are, it continues to be the case that the strategy layer is still the least interesting aspect of the game because it is designed around you hitting these particular story beats, and so the strategy layer doesn't end up being strategic at all. My dream game is still the XCOM game where you have a kind of chaotic COIN system for the strategy layer.

Yeah, while I'm sure anything is possible I definitely don't think the game is balanced around a no-neuromods run, especially on the harder difficulties hahaha. I still love this game, and I'll probably do a second playthrough soon. I started replaying SS2 and my feeling was "ehhh.... I could be playing Prey instead!"

I think 3MA placing more emphasis on strategy game themes and mechanics is a fine idea. I'll also note that it has been awhile since any tabletop games have been discussed. On the one hand that is good for me since I literally don't have any more room in my apartment for board games, but on the other hand it is a real shame because tabletop games are often able to generate a lot of good stories that are conducive to the podcast format. As an aside, Amplitude released a big patch today. I played this patch in beta, and was able to complete a campaign without encountering any bugs. The UI and performance seemed a lot better too.

Okay, actually the most exciting news for me is a Monster Hunter game coming to PC.

The XCOM 2 expansion seems... not great, not that there is a lot of information to go off of. I look forward to killing more Nazis in the Wolfenstein sequel, and killing the Outsider in the Dishonored 2 DLC. Tacoma looks lovely. Klei's new game also looks lovely, and I wish I had a better idea of what the game was. Bummed about the new Bioware thing.

My friends have gotten completely demoralized by this dumb campaign :-(

This Dota 2 co-op campaign is really hard! My friends and I have gotten to the point where we can reliably kill the first boss, but then we get slaughtered whichever area we go to afterwards.

Just hit another annoying bug. This one I think will actually put me off the game for a bit until the next major patch. I researched Universal Aerodynamics so that I could unlock the planes for planetary invasions, but it stayed locked away after I researched it, and everything else I researched after that stayed locked too. The game was totally unplayable at that point as far as I'm concerned.

I haven't been able to play any Dota besides bot matches since the compendium came out because I was dealing with bad packet loss issues with my internet that basically made multiplayer gaming impossible. But I've finally gotten those problems resolved so I'm looking forward to getting into it!

I'll add one more irritating bug in addition to the two mentioned on the show: Endless Space 2 has an issue with with its scripting when it comes to the narrative text. Too often the variable names pop up in these texts instead of the value of whatever the variable is pointing too. Personally, I don't find learning about the great heroic exploits of %VodyaniNPC to be a particularly great read. It's really strange because whatever you thought of all of Amplitude's earlier games, they were all extremely polished in my experience. But Endless Space 2 has been a bit of a mess. There's a lot of stuff that I find underexplained. I just finished a campaign as the Riftborn, and I never used those weird time sphere things because I couldn't determine what the planet depletion mechanic was all about. Seems like a huge oversight to me because without understanding that mechanic it is hard to understand the benefit of making everything else twice as slow. I am hoping that it is just growing pains as the studio scales up after partnering with Sega. Despite the bugs, I'm still having a good time with the game, although I think all the criticisms have been fair. The best thing I can say about the combat is that I don't hate it. I'm on my 4th new campaign of the game and I'm still picking up on some intricacies of the game not related to the uniqueness of the new faction I'm playing so that's a very good sign to me that the game will potentially stay engaging for a good long while. This is in contrast to Civ 6 which had a really strong opening impression but felt more and more shallow with each subsequent new game. I think it is probably time for new 4X games to ditch the conventional victory conditions (conquest, science, economic/industrial). Those are boring, and are responsible for these games having the feeling of sameiness. It would be cool to have a big list of objectives, and each playthrough you receive a randomly selected objective from that list to complete, and then the game is all about figuring out how to get from A to B under your particular conditions, trying to suss out the competition's objectives to determine whether you should treat them as an ally or enemy, etc. Also, I think the fact that a lot of diplomacy stuff is locked away under the tech tree is stupid. You're a spacefaring civilization, you shouldn't have to research how to do trade agreements. I think one obvious area for an expansion for the game is to to make the law/political system have more impact. Then you can lock some of that stuff in the empire expansion tech tree, but keep the diplomatic stuff unlocked. One point Rob made was that there are a lot of developments that are only worth building under the right conditions. I liked that aspect of the game a lot too. It is undermined a bit because by the late game often times you are economically powerful enough that you can just build everything, but I think if they leaned into those sorts of mechanics more heavily you would end up with a game that really did deliver on strategic complexity.

I'll be interested to know what you think when you finish the game. I remember coming across that audio log but not really paying it much mind because I was focused on some other stuff in the level.

I finished the game over the weekend. Without getting into spoilers, I think the ending is really interesting, and there are a couple of details that make it difficult to tease out what's really going on. This is the best discussion about the plot of Prey (and it goes without saying that it is filled with spoilers) that I've been able to track down on the internet: https://www.gamecrate.com/prey-runaway-trolley-ethics-story-ending/16214